The advent and widespread adoption of networked systems has greatly facilitated data transfer capabilities. These systems facilitate dissemination of electronic data locally and across the world. Some systems implement local area networks, wide area networks, the internet, etc. to easily transfer data.
An increasing amount of communications which were traditionally paper-based are now wholly or partially implemented using electronic communications (e.g., electronic mail). However, numerous users of electronic communications may still rely, at least to some degree, upon fixed, tangible paper-based documents.
For example, many documents desired to be communicated electronically are paper-based. For electronic communication, these paper-based documents are converted into an electronic format. Some methods utilize a scanner or an office photocopier to convert the paper-based materials into electronic versions. These methods have the drawback of typically involving some degree of manual oversight or action. Accordingly, the conversions are susceptible to manual errors. In addition, image-quality degradation may be introduced due to the inherent imperfections of the scanning or copying device.
Aspects of the present invention provide improved methods and apparatus which overcome drawbacks of the above-described systems or methods.